Character flashcards with semantic prompts?

[toddwaze]

Has anybody seen or used character flashcards with semantic prompts? This would be useful for someone who wants to avoid assigning English "meanings" to Chinese characters (because we all know there is no one-to-one mapping like that between two languages).

For example, front: "hóng (颜色)", back: "红".

Or even, front: "hóng (colour)", back: "红". (Suitable for less advanced learners, but still avoids the one-to-one pairing of words).

I've started doing some flashcards like this myself; "红" is an easy example, but for many characters it's much harder to devise a good prompt. So I'm just wondering if anyone else has tried a similar approach before...

[Gharial]

Although your idea is certainly interesting (from a more "theoretical" perspective), I wonder if you'd end up learning more about the Chinese of/for the prompts than about the language proper that will definitely occur with/alongside the prompted item in actual usage (and which would therefore "define" 'it' just as well if not better ~ assuming you'll apply your method to compounds and phrases rather than just single characters). Still, that might not be any bad thing if you're at all interested in bilingual lexicography (I mean more as a career...not that I know much about the actual prospects in that field!).

Edited January 21, 2010 at 05:52 PM by Gharial

[chrix]

I'd agree this idea is interesting but ultimately not practical. You don't wanna spend too much time in creating flashcards, and most automated solutions rely on readily available dictionaries such as CEDICT, and that's what you'll get. I think spending more time reading and seeing those words used in context will benefit you more.

Edited January 17, 2010 at 04:48 PM by chrix

[Gharial]

Just back from a shower, and wanting to say, "What was I on about" - any defining metalanguage (of 'prompts', in this discussion) will always be smaller than the language being defined, and therefore manageable (certainly in the early stages) and hopefully not too distracting. That being said, I still wouldn't put too much work into this stuff (unless as I say you're going to be eventually working in lexicography or automated translation or something), nor it seems now would Chrix, and I'm not sure why you'd be too opposed to the prompts being in rough n ready English, Todd.

I mean, if you more or less know the spoken Chinese language related to the prompted item already, you'll hardly be likely to take any prompt in English too literally; and if someone else were eventually to use your flashcards, they might not be able to read the prompt even if they could read the prompted item, meaning that you'd need to design a programme of study that taught the prompts before or alongside the prompted...but that could be an interesting project eh, design e.g. the Chinese dialogic equivalent of 'What's your favourite colour?' 'Red' 'And what's your fave animal?' 'Dogs' etc (Actually, there's one item to possibly test [your design for] your flashcard set, Todd - what exactly is a dog? Obviously an animal, but 'animal' is obviously a big set, so do you devise a prompt along the lines of 'domesticated canine animal'? Or would you settle for something like 'Chases cats'? The choices you'd make regarding the prompt in Chinese would obviously dictate what sort of "additional" Chinese you'd be learning or recycling - more scientificy versus more general "encyclopedic"/world knowledgey).

[chrix]

On the other hand, you could just use a monolingual Chinese dictionary. My flashcards have a field for an English "translation" and a field for a Chinese "explanation".

[Gharial]

Good thinking re. the monolingual Chinese dictionary, Chrix! Something like the Xinhua zidian should be good, for Todd's purposes.

[toddwaze]

Thanks for the ideas. Maybe I should have started off by saying, yes, I want to avoid English altogether if possible. It's not that I'm dogmatic about "immersion", but in this case it shouldn't be too problematic because the flashcards I'm making are for characters which I'm already quite familiar with...I can read them, say them, and use them, I just need to practice WRITING them.

I did actually start by using dictionary-style definitions as flashcard prompts (as chrix suggested). Definitions can get a bit long, though, and I was finding it a drag to have to read (and think about) a long definition just to write a single character. My goal with the semantic prompts is to keep them down to just two Chinese characters (so for dog, the prompt would definitely be "animal" -- add the pinyin to the flashcard, and it becomes quite unambiguous). Here are some more examples:

chá 饮料: 茶

lù 写作: 录

nǐ 代词: 你

biàn "顺利": 便

It's easy when there's an obvious category, as with "茶" (beverage). For others, I have to be more creative, such as "writing" as a prompt for "录". For some characters, a grammatical class such as "pronoun" or "conjunction" is adequate. And as a last resort, I sometimes give up and use a definition or synonym in quotation marks, as with "便".

So I was just posting to ask if anyone in the forums had tried anything similar before. I'm still slowly working on level A of the HSK vocab list. Once complete, I might post my list here, if people are interested.

[chrix]

the main advantage of using dictionary definitions is that you can automatise the process by writing a script extracting the definitions from a digitalised Chinese dictionary. Of course it might suit your needs better if you came up with your own categorisations, but it will take a lot of time (you could be spending learning Chinese ). Ultimately it's a cost-benefit analysis.

[haton]

For training both sound / character / meaning, have you tried playing PINGRID?

New version 3 is just out, and it includes Handwriting training, that means that, at determined intervals you have to write the words with the mouse. All this based on a spaced repetition model, that tracks which words need more training.

Check it out (for free) at: http://ehaton.blogspot.com

[chinopinyin]

@haton: the skritter-like handwriting stuff in PINGRID seems very useful.

I wonder whether you plan to add the new HSK word lists to PINGRID. You can have a look at http://blog.lingomi.com/hsk-lists-2010/ or http://huamake.com/1to6Lists.htm